Produced the Magic/Real Picture Company the program explores the island’s dilemma of dealing with two ‘feral perils’ - one an unwanted invasive predator (the fox); the other a transmissible cancer attacking Tasmania’s largest carnivore, the Tasmanian devil.

Professor Tony Peacock, a member of the Fox Eradication Program’s advisory group has already given his review [Here].

The writer/directors are to be congratulated for their murder-mystery approach to these two important wildlife sagas. For Tasmanian Times readers on both the fox and facial cancer storylines, this program is worthy of your interest.

Notably the fox story begins, not in mid-2001 with media excitements around Longford and the various dead fox incidents but, in 1998 with the arrival of a single fox at Burnie on a freight ferry from Melbourne ports. The directors - to their credit - didn’t get bogged down in a blow-by-blow, tit-for-tat exploration of years of subsequent fox incidents over many years. The story shifts between foxes and devils with insights into Tasmania’s other feral peril, the feral cat and the island’s legacy from its open-slather use of a cheap and deadly poison, Compound 1080.

The draglines are out on the government’s tenaciously held belief - to this day unsubstantiated - of an intentional malicious release of many foxes at the beginning of the new millennium. After a few bumps along the way - hoaxing, tom-foolery and fabrication - and the newest storyline shifts to dung-dogs sniffing up fox poo and forensic labs to detect fox DNA in recovered carnivore scats.

These Tasmanian dung-dogs trained using fox poo imported from Victoria are seen searching after a serendipitous call out report from a woman, the wife of a Midlands grazier. Magic-Real is there to do the unfolding incident the justice it deserves.

In the court of public opinion, the next few moments of this documentary has the potential to turn magic into the real deal. Can we now mark this fox file: “Case closed” or “Case ingoing”?

Could you at least acknowledge the cartoonists when you use their stuff?

Posted by jon on 13/07/09 at 09:00 AM

Seems to be there, Jon - ‘cartoon by Woods’?

Posted by Valleywatcher on 13/07/09 at 01:28 PM

When will people who say there are no foxes in Tasmania get their heads out of the sand?
No disputing sightings of foxes near Burnie after seeing one with my own eyes some months ago.
Am looking forward to the program.

Guba

Posted by gubariginee on 14/07/09 at 06:23 AM

Are you on the sightings record guba hotmail?
Under your real name perhaps?
One thing we can all be sure of from nine years of the fox fantasy is the high degree of anonymity used.
The live fox scenes from Feral Peril need to be explained as ‘not filmed in Tasmania’
Also the scat recovery from Kenilworth needs to be clearly marked re-enactment… as no fox scat numbered 5676 was ever proven DNA fox positive.
I think John McConnell (FEB) could and should clear this one up. He may have to explain.
If the dog sat “fox positive scat” it must have been a fox scat.
So who put it there and when was the scat put there?

Posted by Ian Rist on 14/07/09 at 10:17 AM

One night I saw a pink elephant whilst on the way home.I think that we should have ‘pink elephant task force’.
I don’t know where they are going to get the scats from though.

Posted by Philip Lowe on 16/07/09 at 01:21 PM

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